


Unsaid

by captainhurricane



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Character Study, Gen, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-22
Updated: 2015-04-22
Packaged: 2018-03-25 07:27:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3801913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainhurricane/pseuds/captainhurricane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What he never said and what he left to silence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unsaid

**Author's Note:**

> anxiety tends to give birth to the weirdest of fics.

_Why?_

Snake’s mouth tightens, his teeth clank together as he tries to keep from yelling. She asked me to. Because she looked me straight in the eye and told me to. And I do what she tells me. The words don’t come out and the electric current continues running through his body and instead he keeps on a garbled mumble of I killed her, I killed her, I killed her. 

He stands by her grave and salutes. The wind brings on the scent of fresh white flowers. 

x 

_Why aren’t you saying anything? Why aren’t you doing anything?_

Rage quiets down with time, settles at the back of his head. He lets himself be shaken by Kaz, by the two hands he has pulled out of the line of fire more than once- and have pulled him right back. Kaz repeats the question, hands shaking, voice trembling, cracking and splitting apart at the weight of the lives now on both of their shoulders. Snake has no answer. He pulls silence around himself and lets his rage simmer. 

Outside the steady noise of the helicopter, their Mother Base crashes and burns, fire eating their army, their soldiers. Three hundred and fifty lives lost because that’s the way the world works. 

x

_Don’t you care?_

Look a little to the left, look them straight in the eye. The Boss did always say that caring (too much) for your comrades is the biggest sin a soldier can commit. Snake knows it but he takes a wrong step, makes all the wrong decisions and cares with all the might of his increasingly twisted path. Oh, I care, he wants to say. I’ll always be with you, after all. 

He scatters their ashes to the ocean, makes diamonds out of their ashes. Once a dog of war, always a dog of war. Snake holds on to his comrades with increasing ferocity, with what someone sane would call desperation. 

x

_Don’t you think you’ve gone too far? Boss, I can’t do this anymore._

Snake opens his mouth to say something back, to tell Kaz to watch his place. I pulled you out of the desert and torture, I gave you a home and a job and made you my right hand. All those things he could say. But he lets Kaz speak, lets Kaz’s rage burst out. 

_You’re a fucking monster._

There it is. 

 _You knew what you were getting into,_ Snake says then. Not quite an answer, not all there. Kaz’s hand clutches his cane harder. 

 _Not this. Never this,_  Kaz hisses.  _I’m not your dog anymore. I’m sick of you. I’m sick of this place. I’m sick of thinking the world’s out to get us when it isn’t. When it’s you who’s out to get the world. I’ve had enough._

 _You know what the world does to people like us, Kaz,_  Snake answers but it’s too late. It was too late years ago when all the ash and blood hadn’t yet been carved into their skin. When there was a sliver of chance to stop and think. 

 _You’re a fucking child. A fucking monster and a child and you swallow everyone you get here. I’m not a part of you. I will never be a part of you._  Kaz stabs his cane down like a final mark, a gravestone to what was a friendship, a brotherhood. Snake remains quiet. There is probably someone listening nearby, as there always is among the dogs of war.

x

(a conversation that could have been but never was) 

_Would you have tried?_

It’s a mirror image to the scene from years ago (decades) when Jack (John, Big Boss, the worst of them all) was a young man and she was on the ground at his feet, her eyes terrifying and blue. 

He’s old now and she’s been dead for decades and the one with him will soon be. 

 _If things had been different, perhaps. Perhaps I would have tried to be a different man. To try to be a father to sons I didn’t even know at first existed._  Big Boss looks at the lines of gravestones and then back at his son, the only one out of the three who survived all the way to here, the only one who has the heart for peace. 

_David, I can’t rewind time._

_I know._

_I know I’m not worthy of forgiveness so I won’t ask for it. But I will ask for you to live your life in peace._

_I know._ Now David is smiling an old man’s smile, reminiscent of the man that he was; the one out of three sons who looked the most like their reluctant father but the one who had his heart the less. 

 _It’s okay._ Big Boss sits down, rests against her headstone. His son, his brightest offspring crouches down next to him, the sunset reflected of that oddly old face. _It matters little to you and for good reason but I’m proud of you. The only-_ Big Boss has to clear his throat, has to look down at his hands that have started to shake-  _Snake worthy of that title. In some other time and place I, I would have tried._  His hands have helped him claw his way back up from hell to here, to the white flowers and the memory of the Boss, carried with him to his death. 

x

(Why did you leave me? 

He watches her leave countless times. Always with her back straight, wind whipping her hair and her bandana. Why did you leave me? He watches her die, he pulls the trigger of the gun that kills her and he watches her die. He watches the AI march into the ocean, singing with her voice and her mind and drown. He watches her leave countless times and breaks a little piece of himself each time because she never answers.) 


End file.
